Blocking comment spam using ModSecurity and realtime blacklists

Spammers are known to use compromised hosts from all over the world to send their messages. Many people are blocking or scoring email spam based on realtime blacklist (rbl), which contain ipaddresses of these known bad hosts. In my experience this works fairly well for email. A while ago I noticed in the ModSecurity documentation for version 2.0 that ModSecurity features an operator called rbl, that can be used to check the ipaddress of a visitor with a rbl. So I decided to see if I could use the realtime blacklists to prevent comment spam on my blog. Turns out this works great! In this post I’ll show how to get it working.
Continue reading

Snort_inline in svn updated to 2.6.1.3

This week SourceFire published a security advisory for (among others) Snort version 2.6.1.2, on which Snort_inline is based. So I took some time to update Snort_inline. Normally this would have taken Will and me quite some time, but since we switched to using svn those days are gone. I was able to update it in under a hour. I was very happy I blogged about the procedure to follow, since I had already forgotten about it 😉

Will is preparing a release based on this, which should also build with ClamAV 0.90.

Anyway, svn is up to date, so if you are using Snort_inline and rely on the DCE/RPC preprocessor, please pull the code from svn.

Check it out! 🙂